Drink-Drive Limit

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I come back to the question of drug-driving, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. Nobody expects there to be available a roadside test for drug-driving that is as effective as a breathalyser for alcohol. However, given that figures from the department show that there are now more deaths from drug-driving than from drink-driving, what in particular is the department doing in terms of training or other equipment that would assist the police in roadside enforcement, which has been shown to be the most effective way of deterring this activity?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

There are, of course, a variety of drugs, which need to be tested in different ways. The department is very concerned about drug-driving and will look at it again in the revised road safety strategy. The noble Lord is right that detection is more difficult because of the variety of drugs, but the department is looking carefully at it because the enforcement effort has to be consistent over drugs and drink.

Open Access Rail Services

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I listened to my noble friend with care and respect because he has significant prior experience in running railways. He is right that we should be careful, because we are dealing with only 1% of the passengers and the rest of the network has 99%. We should be careful to allow people to innovate where innovation is a good thing and where there is space for it. We should not allow innovation where it is not a good thing, costs taxpayers money and cannot be accommodated on a very constrained network.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, a lot of people listening to this might think it quite disedifying and perplexing to hear this hate fest against open access services, which are the most popular with commuters, drive down prices where they exist and give consumers what they are looking for. Under the Government’s proposals, the decision on whether open access will be granted for new or continued services will be transferred from an independent regulator to Great British Railways, which is an interested party as a provider of competing services. Does the attitude expressed by the Minister not show how unfit for that purpose the new Great British Railways will be when it starts with such an antagonistic disposition?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord has drunk his own Kool-Aid on this. I made it quite clear that there are benefits to be provided. He also needs to do a bit of careful research, because there are very few commuters on open access services. Commuting is one of the things that has a high fixed cost and generally does not cover the cost of its operations. Open access is successful for people making long-distance journeys irregularly, and some of the operators are very good at it.

The noble Lord also referred to the future railways Bill. We have already made it quite clear that Great British Railways needs to be the body that decides who implements the timetable. Currently, there is not one. It will have to have some rules for access to the railway, which will be developed from the current rules and will be consulted on. If third parties believe that they have been disadvantaged by GBR not following its own rules, or doing something in the wrong way, our proposal will be that they have the ability to appeal to the independent regulator. I think that is perfectly fair, but I also think it is really important that your Lordships’ House recognises that nobody is currently in charge of the national railway timetable except the Secretary of State and me. Outside North Korea, that is really not a good circumstance to have.

International Maritime Organization: Net-Zero Framework

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I am afraid I am not qualified to judge whether or not flying drones over major oceans is going to work in this respect. I will certainly take that suggestion back to my department to see whether or not they can make sense of it.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, given the apparently implacable hostility of the United States Administration and the very low number of states that voted for this framework in London last week, are the Government not deluding themselves in thinking that one more heave and we will achieve it next year? As my noble friend Lord Fuller suggested, would it not be better if the IMO, guided by the Government, were to focus on the question of the dark fleet? This is being used to ship sanctioned oil around the world in a way that only benefits dictators. Would it not be sensible to get real about some of these things?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I think the noble Lord needs to recognise that a worldwide organisation such as the IMO can do more things than one at the same time. What he says about the dark fleet, and what the noble Lord previously said about it, is right, and the IMO should challenge it and do what it can about it. As the noble Lord has just heard, UK shipbuilders and designers are at the forefront of designing new low-carbon and no-carbon shipping. It would be an awful shame if the Opposition Benches were not to support a good piece of the British economy which has the potential to sell not only in Britain but around the world.

Great British Railways: Rolling Stock

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right that there are a lot of old vehicles. The average age of vehicles on the national network is 17 years. There are 12,000 vehicles across 14 operators, and it is essential that we plan for the future, if only because several thousand jobs in the manufacturing plant in Derby and the assembly plants at Newton Aycliffe, Goole and Newport, Monmouthshire, all depend on this—as does, as she is right to say, passenger comfort and reliability for rolling stock that has reached the end of its normal life.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, when the Government nationalised the train operating companies, they said that one of the advantages was that they would no longer be paying fees to the private sector. Have the Government carried out, or do they intend to carry out, an assessment of the value for money to the taxpayer of continuing to finance rolling stock through the use of roscos in the private sector?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The Government’s policy is to continue to use the private sector to supply rolling stock to the British railway market. That has been quite clear since the manifesto before the election and nothing has changed. I think it is likely that the cost of rolling stock will be better than it has been, simply because the life of the rolling stock has been uncertain, but not sufficiently to diminish the risk taken by those companies, which is why they exist and why they should make a profit.

Aviation Safety (Amendment) Regulations 2025

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords, following on from my noble friend Lady Foster, I will touch on the second point she raised, because it is relevant. We have a situation where the CAA’s delegation and decision-making powers are being changed because of the nature of the arrangements with the European Union.

This whole set of regulations is part of a much broader project led by the CAA at the moment, which deals with, among other things, the simplification of the licensing and training of general aviation pilots—of which I am one. The issues around the changes in licensing are very important, because they bring about the ability of someone, who, like me, flies a single-engine piston aircraft, to fly an electric aircraft. I will not go into the shock-horror that the likelihood of me flying an electric aircraft is equivalent to my enthusiasm for driving an electric car, which is rather limited at the moment.

My question, which follows on from the point raised by my noble friend Lady Foster, is about the delegation of powers to the CAA. She raised a very good point on drones, but I would like the Minister to set out for us whether there were any changes as a result of these circumstances in the agencies, which can have a delegation from the CAA to make decisions, and whether that is adequate in terms of who looks into which agencies can have those delegated powers.

I will raise another point. This statutory instrument does not appear to have happened through impact assessments or anything else; it is a usual statutory instrument where nothing seems to have been necessary to draw to anyone’s attention. To what extent are the resources of the CAA being tested, as a result of these regulations or of ones that have been envisaged? As I think we are all aware, the CAA is short of cash. It is already doing a considerable number of functions, including coming up to date on the things that I have referred to: technology, licensing, the training of pilots and so on.

There is also the question of safety, which develops inexorably as we go along due to the rise of new-generation aircraft. There is also the issue around airports, including the changes in the control zone basis of airports, which must be costing the CAA considerable sums of money. Can the Minister also confirm that there are adequate resources for the operation of the CAA to pay agencies or others to which it delegates powers, and that he is satisfied that we will not need to go back to the Treasury and ask it for more cash? Safety in the air—the safety of training and the other uses of pilots et cetera—must be paramount if our skies are to be secure.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I express my gratitude to the Minister for arranging a very helpful briefing by officials.

Like my noble friend Lady Foster of Oxton, I had some concern about the abandonment of the use of Form 1 for certain non-safety critical parts. We can rely only on the personal assurance of the Minister that, in proceeding in this route, he and his department will take full responsibility for the consequences of that decision. As my noble friend pointed out, the notion of a non-safety critical part can be deceptive because of the close integration of every working part on an aircraft. We cannot challenge the statutory instrument on that basis; we have to accept that the Minister and his department know what they are doing and that they are willing to accept the responsibility that falls on them from pursuing this proposal.

I also share the caution expressed by my noble friend Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate about the delegation of Civil Aviation Authority powers, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that. Beyond that, and with those reservations, the Official Opposition have no objection to this instrument, which consists largely of consolidation and clarification. We have no objection to it, but we would like to hear the Minister’s response on those areas that cause us some potential concern.

National Policy Statement for Ports

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

We have had a pretty devastating critique of all sides of this document in this debate. The revisions were initiated by the previous Government with a view to promoting a thriving, modern port sector, but it has emerged under this Government as something of a damp squib. Even the Minister does not seem to think that it has much content. I listened to his speech carefully, and he delivered the preamble very well, telling us all about the procedural history of the document—including even the dates on which the Select Committee in the other place had taken evidence. I expected him to go on to tell us about what the document actually said, the main changes that it was going to make and how it was going to achieve the Government’s growth agenda—but he just sat down at that point. That is because the document is wholly inadequate to the challenges and opportunities.

My noble friend Lord Moynihan spoke about the grid connections and the need to increase them, and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, spoke about rail and road connectivity and other matters of that sort. I am not summarising the whole debate—but my noble friends Lord Mountevans and Lord Fuller added devastatingly to her critique, on the basis of very considerable knowledge. My noble friend Lady Maclean of Redditch pointed out that the NPSP lives in a sort of parallel universe, with no connection to the Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which we are debating in a different forum at this very moment—from day to day, in the course of this week. It does not seem to do the job.

Ports are central to the economy of this country; they handle the overwhelming majority of our trade and act as gateways for energy and manufacturing, providing employment and opportunities in coastal communities. They are strategic national infrastructure without which growth, resilience and security cannot be delivered. What marks out the United Kingdom port sector is the environment in which it operates. It is unsubsidised, competitive and dynamic—well, reasonably dynamic if one believes what my noble friend Lord Fuller said; perhaps some parts of it need a little shaking up.

When a port expands, develops a new terminal or invests in green technology, it does so with private capital and at its own risk, which means that the framework set by the Government must not disincentivise investment. We support that approach to the provision of ports in this country; we do not want to go back to the disaster of nationalised ports—and the mention of the dock labour scheme by the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, reminds one of the horrors that existed on those occasions. But to be successful and invest, the ports need some sort of certainty.

The current planning system is, frankly, far too complex. Ports have to navigate local planning authorities, marine licensing regimes, environmental regulators and in some cases the national infrastructure planning process; the result is fragmentation, duplication and delay. We could look to a document like this to start removing those problems, but it does nothing—it changes nothing of any real significance at all. Time and again, applicants face the uncertainty of competing judgments from different authorities.

This is no small matter—every delay in planning ties up capital, weakens competitiveness and deters future proposals. In a sector where operators already carry full commercial risk, that uncertainty is corrosive. If an operator is prepared to risk its own capital within the bounds of environmental and safety law, that willingness should be taken as compelling evidence of need. That principle is acknowledged in the draft statement, but it must be made stronger and clearer. Forecasts have a role in setting context, but they must never be allowed to become shackled or allow the planning system to be used to constrain investment.

The draft statement includes national freight forecasts. As background, they are useful, but they are no more useful than if anybody else commissioned a national freight forecast from a reputable body. There is nothing particularly insightful about them simply because they are published by the Government, but they must not be allowed to become constraints. To treat them as in some ways binding would be to undermine the very responsiveness that has been a defining feature of the port sector in this country.

Somebody a moment ago—forgive me if I forget which noble Lord—said that to have competition you need some surplus capacity. Tying the system to forecasts would be fatal in that regard. Ports operate in fast-moving competitive markets; they must be able to respond to emerging opportunities, such as hydrogen, carbon shipping and storage, offshore renewables and international redistribution. But they must continue simply to feed us and provide us with the goods that we depend on day to day. All these wonderful, environmental, green things are very important, but we fundamentally depend on this: 40% of our food is imported into this country and a lot of it comes on ships. A lot of other heavy goods also come here. This cannot be captured adequately on backward-looking models by this sort of forecast. If every scheme is required to prove its case against centrally produced forecasts, we will miss opportunities that are vital to the future of the economy.

The draft statement acknowledges that it is for each port to take its own commercial view of demand and to bear its own risks. That is the correct principle, and it must be reinforced clearly throughout the final document. Building capacity and resilience ahead of demand is not speculative extravagance; it is a strategic necessity if the UK is to withstand shocks to supply chains and maintain competitiveness. I was horrified by the figures quoted by my noble friend Lord Fuller on the costs of landing goods at different ports in this country compared with a serious network of major ports facing us across the North Sea.

We come then to energy. Ports stand ready to enable cleaner growth from shore power, electrification and new fuels, but cannot do this while electricity prices in the United Kingdom remain among the highest in Europe. They are not among the highest actually; they are the highest—driven in part by layers of environmental regulations. Nor can they deliver if grid connections are delayed year after year. The outcome is perverse: a policy environment that speaks of net zero with urgency but in practice deters the very investment needed to achieve it.

I put three questions to the Minister. First, will he confirm that the forecasts in the final statement will be contextual only and not determinative nor taken by the planning system as being determinative, and that promoters will be free to take their own view of need? Secondly, what steps will the Government take to bring down electricity costs and accelerate grid connections so that ports can invest in green infrastructure rather than being held back by policy-driven costs? Thirdly, how does this document fit in with the Chancellor’s ambition, which she stated in a Written Statement on 17 March this year? I quote:

“To reset the UK’s regulatory landscape and achieve this vision, the government will implement a package of reforms over the Parliament that focus on … tackling complexity and reducing the burden of regulation, including that the government will commit to reducing the administrative costs of regulation for businesses by 25% by the end of this Parliament”.


Is the port sector going to benefit from that pledge and why does it not appear in this document as a driving consideration?

The port sector needs a framework that provides clarity, consistency and proportion. If the national policy statement delivers these qualities, ports will invest boldly, they will innovate and they will support the growth and resilience that this country needs. But if the statement leaves ambiguity, lacks ambition, constrains investments or piles systemic obligations onto individual schemes, we will deter the very capital on which future prosperity depends.

Looked at as a narrow planning document, this might just work—but as a vision of the ports system that we want to see in this country, it fails systematically and comprehensively. I do not think I am going too far in saying that the tenor of this debate is that the Government should take this away, start again and come back with something that sets a real vision for ports that will serve us well into the future.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Monday 13th October 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

Leave out “agree” and insert “disagree”.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Motion 1A, I will speak to the other Motion that I have tabled in this group. I hope noble Lords will forgive me for being distressingly frank. The background to the Bill is the Government’s payment of the Danegeld, if you like, to their friends in the trade unions and in a network of left-wing local authorities, who have seethed with resentment for many years at the success of the private sector and want to see it effectively eliminated from the provision of public transport services in this country—the same motivation that lay behind the passenger railway services Bill, which we passed before Christmas.

That is why the Conservative group and the House as a whole supported amending the Bill on Report to include a purpose to which the Government could be held to account as to its effect, putting passengers and their needs at the heart of the Bill from the outset. The Government, using their majority in the other place, have deleted that purpose. There is no standard, no accountability, no measure to which we can turn from the Bill itself and say to the Government, “You promised you would achieve this by these measures. You promised that this was the purpose you were setting out to effect and we can hold you to it”. None of that is there. The Bill simply stands on its own, a great experiment with the provision of public transport but with no accountability for the Government behind it. That is the simple fact behind Motion 1A but, as it happens, I do not propose to test the opinion of the House on it.

I turn, then, to Motion 8A, which covers two subsections that have been removed from the Bill, Clause 14(5) and (6), which your Lordships added on Report for a very good reason. The first, subsection (5), related to the £2 bus fare cap. The fact is that the Conservatives pledged to keep this going for another year. The Government removed it. Of course putting the fare cap up by 50% had an effect on the most vulnerable people, because it is the most vulnerable people—those who are low-paid workers—who depend most on buses for getting to work, for example. Yet the Government say, “We don’t need to consider that. We’re going to look at the effect of the £3 fare cap, so we don’t need to consider the effect of the £2 fare cap”. What is the point of looking at the effect of the £3 fare cap unless you can compare it with the effect of the £2 fare cap? Comparison is the very purpose of that study. The Government having made no concession on that—they could easily have said, “We will do something on the £2 fare cap as part of our review of the £3 fare cap”—and I will, when the time comes, test the opinion of the House.

Finally, on the SEND review, we talk about vulnerability. I remind noble Lords of the fragile structure of the services on which SEND pupils depend. It may be that the Government will resolve all this in the long term and there will not be any distinct SEND pupils because, as the Minister said, they are all going to be mainstreamed somehow, so they will not need to travel, but the fact is that today they do. They rely on a network of small providers, engaged by local authorities, that depend on part-time workers, many of whom earned less in each year than was required to be eligible for national insurance contributions. Because of the drop in the threshold from roughly £10,000 to £5,000, they are now caught by those national insurance contributions, which is having a devastating effect on the cash flow of those small operators, many of which now refuse contracts or are withdrawing from them where they are permitted to do so by their terms. The only result of that will be higher costs for local authorities, with fewer providers—the worst possible outcome.

The Government say they have provided money to local authorities to cover those costs—which, of course, they have. I do not doubt what the Government say as a matter of fact; they have provided money to local authorities. So what is the problem with a review that will actually identify whether that provision has been directed towards those local providers, is working and has been effective, and that the sum involved is correct? There can be no problem with such a review—except that the Government are keen to hide something. Again, when we come to Motion 8A, which captures both those subjects—I ask noble Lords to bear in mind that it has two parts to it: SEND and the £2 fare cap are both comprised in that Motion—I will test the opinion of the House.

I think it is time that the Government listened to what this House says. When it sends modest amendments, simply calling for reviews, to the other place, the Government should start listening and not simply turn everything down as a matter of course, which increasingly seems to be the way in which they want to conduct themselves. I beg to move Motion 1A.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I want to say a few words on this issue as the introducer of the £2 bus fare cap and the person who wrote the relevant sections of our manifesto, which committed to keep it for the duration of the Parliament and fund it, importantly, from savings that we were going to make in rail services. We do not spend enough time in this country talking about buses. Two and a half times more journeys are made by bus than by the national rail network. You would not know that from the national press, which is very London-centric on this subject, but in most parts of the country buses are critical, so I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate.

I shall say a word or two about my noble friend Lord Moylan’s purpose clause and his remarks on that. He talked about the Government trying to help their friends in local authorities. What is interesting about this legislation is that, if you look at what has happened to bus services, the real challenge, and one of the problems, is that what happened during the pandemic is that a significant number of people stopped using buses for rather obvious reasons and never returned. That caused a huge financial problem for the bus network and has caused lots of routes that were previously profitable not to be profitable. The thing that is missing in the legislation is that you can offer local authorities the powers to franchise services all you like, but unless the Treasury is going to give local authorities the money to pay for those bus services, all you do is take loss-making services that are being reduced by private sector operators or by local authorities that cannot pay for them, and the local authority ends up having to take them away because it has no ability to pay for them.

When this legislation gets on to the statute book, I will be interested to see whether the Government fund the powers to the level that you would have to in order to deliver an improvement to bus services. I suspect, given the dog’s breakfast the Chancellor is making of the economy and the fact that there is less rather than more money available for public services, that that is not going to happen, but we will see how that develops in the future. I think my noble friend Lord Moylan does not have to worry in one sense, because I do not think this cunning plan that the Government have implemented to help local authorities is going to help them at all.

Specifically on the cap, the Minister talked about the review of the £2 bus fare and said that it was not good value for money. What he missed out was that the Government decided, without having concluded the review of the £2 bus fare cap, to have a £3 bus fare cap, which suggests that they like the principle, but introduced it and picked a number without having done the review on the £2 bus fare cap in the first place. That demonstrates not sensible, evidence-based policy-making but a Treasury-driven “Let’s just reduce the cost of the policy and not look at the impact it was having”.

When I talked to bus companies, I found there were two issues relating to the bus fare cap that were important in driving up bus ridership. One was the obvious one, which is that it reduced the cost. Particularly in rural areas—as has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords—where you often have to take a number of parts of a journey with a number of fares, it drove down the cost of those journeys. That is really important for people going to work or accessing education, so that had a big impact.

The other thing was the clarity and the consistency that it provided in communicating the level of bus fare to people, which had, I have to confess, a rather surprising impact. When talking to bus companies, I asked the question, “If we were to take this away, what would you do to your pricing structure?” What was interesting was that they all said having a round-number bus fare had a surprisingly powerful effect on their ability to market services to consumers, rather than people not knowing what a bus fare was going to be and a whole range of complexity. I think it needed a bit more time to bed in, and that is why I support a proper review having been carried out.

To go back to the point I made about funding, what we suggested—to take savings from the reforms that we were going to put in place for rail services and use some of that to fund the bus services—would have rebalanced where people chose to take their journeys. More people depend on bus services for important local journeys. Whether to access education, to access the health service or to access employment, far more people across the whole of the country use bus services to do that than use the rail network.

The Government have done the reverse. The first thing they did was come in and give railway drivers—some of the best-paid public servants—a pay rise and ask for nothing in return; they got no productivity improvements for the rail user. That money could have been spent on improving the quality of bus services across the country. That would have been the right decision, and it is the decision that we were going to make. When we do not see increases to funding for bus services—when we simply give local authorities the powers to franchise but with no money to deliver that—then people on all sides of your Lordships’ House will think that making savings in the rail network and putting the money into buses would have been the right decision. I am sorry the Government chose not to do so.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Harper for reminding us of the importance of funding and the fact that the Bill is almost meaningless unless large amounts of funding are attached to it for local authorities. That is not an original point; it is one that was made forcefully by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, at an earlier stage of debate on the Bill, but we have still heard nothing about the large amounts of funding that the Government are going to have to put into buses in order to make the Bill a reality.

I turn to the Motion by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who happens today to be sitting behind me, and who is apparently my new best friend. I understand—I hope I am not traducing her here—that she is not intending to divide the House on her Motion, but if she did then we would stick loyally with her as we did before. The Conservative Party is and always has been the party of villages, and whoever speaks up for villages in your Lordships’ House will have our support. It is a tragedy that the Government are willing to defer for a whole five years—into a new Parliament, when there is no doubt that they will not be the Government—a commitment to look at the effect of their policies on villages.

None the less, I have made it clear that I do not intend to divide the House on Motion 1A, so at this stage I beg leave to withdraw Motion 1A.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

Leave out “agree” and insert “disagree”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, on Vision Zero, rightly put safety on buses at the heart of this Bill. Who can argue with the aim of zero fatalities on our roads and a culture in the bus industry of safety throughout? The Government’s clear response in taking this forward, including best practice internationally and the new road safety strategy—I think the Minister said it is the first since 2011—really does show action is taking place in this safety space. It is a great assurance to our Benches.

On collecting data on violence on the bus network, we are in absolutely no doubt about the Government’s commitment to this, especially given the awaited VAWG strategy. Given the clear acknowledgement that this data is already collected by the police across the country, and that this new strategy is due, we are satisfied that this concern is being properly addressed, so the amendment is not needed. What is needed is more resources for our police, but that is a debate for another day.

As this Bill seeks to improve bus services across the country, safety in every aspect will be key. We are pleased to hear the way forward to address safety outlined by the Minister.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I was depressed by the remarks of the Minister, but I have been depressed further into almost silence by the astonishing remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon. The complacency they both show on these two really important issues is staggering.

Since we last debated this, there has been an appalling crash at Victoria bus station, and what is going to change? Nothing. We will have a road safety strategy that will encompass all modes of transport by road, including foot, bicycle and whatever. That is a good thing, and we should have it, but for buses changes are needed in operator mentality and practice. We see no sign of those happening. They will not emerge from a strategy, but only if the Government say, “This is our objective and we will make this happen”. That is what the Minister is not saying. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, did not hear him not saying it clearly enough.

As for my noble friend Lord Moynihan and all this nonsense about what was discussed when, none of that matters. What matters is what my noble friend Lady Owen said—the actual experience of women and girls travelling on buses. They do not feel safe. The Government again come forward with astonishing complacency about this, saying that it is already being done and there is nothing to be added. It really is not good enough. If the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and my noble friend Lord Moynihan choose to divide the House on these matters—I make the point clearly to the noble Lord, Lord Snape, that that is their choice; I have known my noble friend for what must be nearly 50 years now, and he has never been my glove puppet during all that time—then we will support them, because we think these issues are very important.

Finally, as far as dark influence within the Labour Party is concerned, it is astonishing that the noble Lord, Lord Snape, should make his naive remarks on the day on which Mr Paul Holden’s book The Fraud is published, a tract dedicated to exposing the conspiracy behind the Starmer Government, the undeclared funding and the actions of Mr Morgan McSweeney in destroying Jeremy Corbyn and inserting Sir Keir Starmer as his substitute as leader of the Labour Party. I realise that the noble Lord, Lord Snape, is a byword for naive credulity among his colleagues, but I suggest that he should get hold of a copy of the book published today and sit down, perhaps this evening, with a stiff whisky by his hand so that he can prepare to anaesthetise himself against the shocks that will be revealed to him. Then he will realise what nonsense he has just said about my noble friend’s amendment.

Rail Fares

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Baroness highlights that the number of discount cards has grown over the years. Some of them have different conditions from others, so it is quite hard to understand, if you do not have one, which one might be applicable. We are mindful that, when GBR is up and running, it addresses consistency and examines what else can be done to encourage people to travel by train.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, fare simplification, by definition, means that there will be fewer fares options. Can the Government guarantee that, under their simplification programme, no individual fare will go up purely because of fare simplification?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord has some background in this, because he was deputy chair of Transport for London and, I think, the Deputy Mayor for Transport. He knows perfectly well that, when we rationalised the fare structure on the Tube, some fares did go up while others went down. We made sure that the fares that went up were generally ones that a lot of people did not pay for and that the benefits were found across the system. If we have 50 million fares, we inevitably need to reduce that number and ensure that they are balanced. The noble Lord has some experience of balancing them within an overall fare rise, so he should use that knowledge to his own advantage, because I do not particularly want to tell him this again.

Hovercraft (Application of Enactments) (Amendment) Order 2025

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Greenway (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this order, on which I have no complaint— I think it is all very sensible, but I would say that, as a mariner. Following on from what the noble Lord who has just spoken said, I shall be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about this movement of hovercraft from sea to land. The RNLI already uses small hovercraft for dealing with waters where the tide goes out a long way and there are a lot of mudflats, where they find them very useful.

However, in terms of general passenger carriage, as the Minister referred to, the service between Southsea and Ryde is in fact the last all-year-round service in the world that uses hovercraft for carrying passengers. In some ways, it is very welcome that it uses hovercraft—as we have heard, invented by Christopher Cockerell—but it is also rather sad because, in many ways, the hovercraft was a brief flash in the pan in maritime history. It developed quite considerably from small hovercraft, such as the SRN6, up to the SRN4, which was quite a large hovercraft—in fact, it was even lengthened for service across the channel from Dover to Calais.

However, hovercraft were not without their problems, and in fact there were at least two fatal accidents. One of the smaller SRN hovercraft flipped over in a gale just off Southsea and nine people were drowned. One of the larger ones, also in a gale, hit the breakwater coming into Dover, which put a 60-foot gash in its side, and a number of people fell out, four of whom, sadly, were pronounced dead.

The hovercraft was, in many ways, an interesting and wonderful invention, but I am afraid that it was overtaken, first, by the huge fuel-price hikes in the 1960s and 1970s and, then, of course, by the introduction of the Channel Tunnel, which really killed off the larger hovercraft that crossed the channel. They went out of action in the year 2000.

As I said, I have no complaints about this order, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the Minister on retaining his place in the recent reshuffle.

Following my noble friend Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate’s speech, which I thought was fascinating, it may be that, as a result of that speech and the points made by him and, to some extent, by the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, the Minister might now prefer to withdraw this statutory instrument on the grounds that the department has probably miscategorised hovercraft as properly falling under maritime law and come back with an instrument that acknowledges the richer context in which hovercraft are increasingly used and—if we are to believe my noble friend and the noble Lord, who have some expertise—are likely to be increasingly used, so that the statutory instrument can be pertinent, robust and what is called future-proof. If so, we would completely understand why the Minister would wish to withdraw the instrument and we would not object to its withdrawal.

Space Industry (Indemnities) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 5th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for introducing this Bill, which, although a Private Member’s Bill, received the support of the previous Conservative Government; I understand that it has the support of the current Government as well.

I do not want to sound the slightest bit grinchy in the midst of such enthusiasm for space travel as has been expressed in this debate, but it falls to me, I think, to ask a few practical questions about how this measure is going to operate and what the justification is for transferring this liability to the taxpayer, who has not been mentioned so far by any of the speakers in the debate. We on these Benches obviously welcome the prospect of space travel originating in the United Kingdom. As Conservatives, we particularly welcome the fact that private investors are expected to be the driving force behind this programme. That is right and proper, for the large rewards that may flow to private investors are earned because of the risk they assume, but, if too much of that risk is transferred to the taxpayer, the balance is lost.

This leaves me with some questions for my noble friend and the Minister. First, it is implicit in the current arrangements that insurers are providing, and available to provide, only capped cover for damage caused by operators. Is that correct? Is that insurance available even on a capped basis and is it the norm for current operators?

Secondly, the Government will in future, as a result of this Bill, be obliged to bear the liability above an agreed cap, but we have no indication of how that cap will be determined. How will the Government ensure that they are not accepting an excessive or indeed unnecessary amount of risk on behalf of the taxpayer? Will the Government charge a fee or a premium for the unlimited risk that they are taking on? After all, the arrangement proposed is not unusual. I have it in respect of my own motor car: I have an excess that I have to pay myself, then an unlimited liability passes to the insurer in the event that I cause any damage. But I have to pay quite a chunky premium for that. Will the beneficiaries of this arrangement have to make a payment akin to an insurance premium?

Thirdly, if an operator can obtain free or nearly free top-up cover from the Government, what incentive will he have to maximise cover from the insurance sector? Surely the incentive would be to minimise expensive private insurance and maximise the Government’s indemnity.

Fourthly, risk affects not only balance sheets but behaviour. Someone whose potential loss is fully covered may act more recklessly than someone who has more skin in the game, to use that rather horrible phrase. Are the Government confident that transferring a higher level of risk to the taxpayer will not encourage a more insouciant attitude to safety on the part of operators? I say this with no disrespect to the CAA as the regulator, but it cannot inspect what is going on inside boardroom heads.

On a point of some detail which I am genuinely curious about, I draw attention to Section 4(1) of the Space Industry Act 2018, which provides:

“A person does not require an operator licence to carry out spaceflight activities in respect of which it is certified by Order in Council that arrangements have been made between the United Kingdom and another country to secure compliance with the international obligations of the United Kingdom”.


It follows from this that at least theoretically and in certain circumstances there will be operators operating from the United Kingdom who will not have a licence, because they do not require an operator licence under Section 4(1).

The Bill before us today seeks to moderate the current arrangements through the means of the wording of the operator licence. But in circumstances where there is no licence, it is clear that this Bill is going to have no effect. My question is whether such arrangements already exist and whether there are examples of such arrangements that have been certified by Order in Council. What liability arrangements does the Minister envisage in those circumstances and will he confirm that those liability arrangements are going to remain unchanged?

Would the matter be different if those arrangements were made with a private company? Imagine a circumstance where our obligations under NATO, which are international obligations and so would fall under Section 4(1), result in the United States launching satellites from the United Kingdom. I can understand that happening. What if the United States were to contract that to, say, Mr Musk’s operation—a very likely possibility? How does the liability work in those cases, and will that change as a result of the Bill? If so, how do the Government envisage that working?

I have other questions that I would like to ask, but I think that is enough for the Minister to be going on with. The enthusiasm that we have for space is tremendous and I encourage it. I myself do not expect to see the earth down there below me, not in my time, but no doubt there are younger Members of your Lordships’ House, some of them behind me, who have that prospect, and I wish them well in it. In the meantime, I would simply like to know that we have buttoned down exactly what it is that the Bill is leading to, and that the taxpayer is not going to be given a large liability that should more properly be borne by those who reap the financial and commercial benefits of space travel.